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A Perfect Mismatch

by Ryan Murphy
Entertainment Weekly, No. 169
May 7, 1993

Benny
& Joon beats the odds

Mary
Stuart Masterson has experienced love
in the movies. But love at the
movies . . . now
that’s a very
different story. On her first date, at a showing of Aliens,
she barely watched the screen. “I wasn’t feeling
well,” the
26-year-old actress says, blushing. “I spent an hour and a
half
throwing up in the bathroom.”

For
Johnny Depp, the topic of romantic movie dates summons equally
bittersweet memories. “When I was a teenager,”
remembers the
29-year-old heart stopper of Edward Scissorhands
and Cry-Baby,
“I went to see Star Wars at a drive-in in
Florida. I was all
excited.” But instead of getting smitten, Depp and his date
just
got bitten, by mosquitoes. “It was so bad that I ran to the
snack
bar and got this mosquito repellent, but all it did was make us
stink. It was a total disaster.”

“Actually,”
Depp adds, his eyes narrowing into slits, “I’ve
never heard of
this phrase date movie. Is this a new
phenomenon?”

New?
No. Rekindled? Yes. After a decade dominated by action films, the
sleeper success of Benny
& Joon—an oddball romance starring
Masterson and Depp as seemingly ill matched lovers who find each
other a perfect fit—is the latest evidence that movies made
for
couples are finding their niche once again. In its first weeks, the
film has launched a flurry of hand–holding in the dark,
despite
its commercially improbable story: Masterson plays Joon, a
schizophrenic cared for by her big brother, Benny (Aidan Quinn).
Enter Depp’s Sam, a dyslexic charmer obsessed with silent
comedies.
Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy visits girl in institution and
wins her back.

“People
don’t just want to see tits and screwing and shooting and
decapitated heads,” says Depp. “I think movie
executives have
underestimated the American public.”

Masterson
agrees. “It’s stupid that people think of movies
like Benny &
Joon as surprising when they do well,” she says.
“They are
basic stories about the most fundamental human needs. And the fact
that those are considered risks, and the RoboCop
movies
mitigate those risks—well, it’s backward. Movies
like Benny &
Joon are universal.”

Even
so, the film was nearly derailed before shooting began. Originally
Laura Dern and Woody Harrelson were attached to the project. But then
Dern passed and Harrelson, who had committed to play Benny, jumped
into Paramount’s Indecent
Proposal. Furious, MFM slapped Harrelson
and Paramount with a lawsuit (since it settled out of court), and the
movies fate hung by a thread.

“Laura
Dern is great,” says Depp. “And Woody
Harrelson . . . well, I’ve
never seen anything he’s done, but I’m sure
he’s very good. But
Aidan is my idea of the perfect man. And Mary Stuart, she has
knowledge way beyond her years.”

Like
many of his roles, Depp’s Sam
is a misunderstood antihero, a type he gravitates toward because
“somebody who is different, who is judged on appearance
instead of
heart, who is looked upon as a freak—well, all I can say is,
freaks
are my heroes.” Nonetheless, “after playing Sam, I
figure we’ve
pretty much covered the innocent-lonely-guy sort of thing.
I’m
trying to go elsewhere.” That he may do in Tim
Burton’s Ed
Wood, a black comedy in which Depp is set to play the
‘50s
transvestite filmmaker Edward D. Wood Jr. (Plan 9 From Outer
Space), who is considered the worst director in movie
history. In
the film, due for production at Disney this summer, Depp gets to pet
pink angora sweaters and dress up in women’s clothing. He can
hardly wait.

Masterson,
whose roles in Some Kind of Wonderful and Fried
Green
Tomatoes gave her ample experience with eccentric characters
(“I
get a lot of ‘I’m a misfit too!’ fan
letters”), had to walk
a finer line when playing Joon.

“Every
time you see something about mental illness in movies,” she
says,
“it’s always this descent into madness, or people
are labeled as
special, like, ‘What we’re actually trying to say
is, this person
is fucked up.’ In preparing for Joon, I discovered that
it’s not
gloom and doom all the time. But I was very scared of coming off as
flip.”

For
all its difficulties, Masterson considers the role “a
gift.”
Usually, the actress says, she’s “like the twelfth
girl on the
list. If the part’s a tomboy, she swears, I might get it. Or
if it’s
written for Jodie [Foster], I might have a shot after the other two
in front of me pass.”

Because
there aren’t enough good parts to go around, Masterson has
written
her own. In Around the Block, an independent
production she’ll
also direct this fall, she plays a woman who conquers her fears by
becoming a singer. “It’s a romantic comedy
too,” she says
proudly. “Who knows? Maybe it will become a big date movie.
If I’m
lucky.”